There were so many things I wanted to do when I lived in Alaska. However, the state is so huge and so full of natural wonders that it's impossible to see and do it all. Once I left, though, my biggest regret was not getting to Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula.
My first exposure to this area was when I was around eleven years old during a family vacation to Grand Teton National Park. We were staying in Jackson Hole and my parents became transfixed by the Thomas Mangelsen gallery there. I was totally taken in too and remember standing in front of his iconic photograph Catch of the Day, completely awed. Shortly after moving to Anchorage, I learned that that picture, and many others like it, were taken just a couple hundred miles away from my house. You had to take a float plane to get there, but you could get there all the same. I tried to talk my Mom, whose favorite animal is the Grizzly, into doing it and I redoubled my efforts once a couple of my friends took the trip and came back gushing about the experience, justifying the cost with cliche-sounding but totally true phrases like "once in a lifetime experience," but for some reason she resisted.
Fast forward to this last summer when Cory and I took a two-week vacation back to Alaska. In addition to the hikes and restaurants that were on our must-do list two big summertime experiences I missed out on during my time there: Denali and Katmai. Convincing Cory of Denali was no big thing: he was almost as eager to do it as I was. Katmai, however, took some doing. Eventually, though, I got him to agree to it, as apparently my once-in-a-lifetime logic (not to mention my stubbornness and persistence) began to justify the cost.
We contacted Steve Jones, the same pilot that my friends Dave and Amy used on their trip, and before we knew it we were on our way to the Alaska Peninsula. Let me tell you, I cannot recommend him enough. He was friendly, extremely knowledgeable, and a very proficient, experienced pilot: the trifecta Alaskan bush and float-plane pilots. He even remembered Dave and Amy from nearly two years before. He was also experienced with what happens on the ground: for instance, he knew to keep herding me along when I saw the first batch of mama/cub groupings far from the falls because if you stopped anywhere, you risked getting stuck there if a nearby bear necessitated a trail closure. So we pressed on until we got to the viewing platforms.
Words can't even begin to describe the experience we there, but luckily I took over 1,000 (yes, more than one thousand) pictures that day. If a picture is worth a thousand words then I have more than a million collected that should tell the story pretty well. I'll begin with one of the photos I took once we had gotten to the much-desired upper viewing platform, one of a brave mama bear breaking the rules of bear society, fishing with three cubs in tow so that she could continue to feed them. I gotta say, I like her style: just standing there, waiting for a fish to jump into her waiting jaws. I wouldn't do it much differently myself!
